eBuyer have posted photos on Facebook which reveal that they rate their employees based on how many RETURNS they reject.

as noted by Reg reader Phil, the firm’s Xmas celebrations hit something of a snag, after one of the photos it posted on Facebook revealed that ebuyer rates its employees based on how many returns they reject.

Sorry for the long delay between posts, we’ve been inundated with emails over the Christmas period of problems you’ve had with eBuyer and simply haven’t had time to catch up with everyone.

Among lots of emails, almost all of the problems have been issues with faulty goods being sent and refused for returns. One user claims he had been sent and empty box and eBuyer had simply said this was impossible because they ‘check the weights’. Another user was apparently sent a CPU with bent pins, it was collected but by eBuyer but the return claim was refused because it ‘took more than 11 days’.

Another unhappy customer, Illy, had a similar problem to me many months ago. A faulty HDD was sent and eBuyer refused to refund the full cost or replace the drive; and demanding it was the responsibility of the manufacturer. You can follow her thread on ConsumerActionGroup.

Please do continue to send in your reports. We’ll help where we can. We also have a very unused Forum where we’d be really glad to hear your views – we think you’d prefer to see your comments online and support each other; rather than our sporadic blog posts.

Forum!

It’s always good to see a Wikipedia page, such as the one for eBuyer being cleaned up.

Unfortunately it seems most of the criticisms of eBuyer have been completely removed from the article. Apart from a few select events of delivery troubles, there’s no mention of the many complaints of their returns policies and other problems we detail here.

The link to this site has also been removed from the article, claiming a lack of evidence. Unfortunately most people aren’t able to take problems they’ve had with eBuyer to Small Claims Courts, so I’m not sure what ‘Ebtch‘ is expecting.

Fortunately we are now reaching a much wider audience, so hello there! If you do have any ‘evidence’ we can use to show other customers of the possible pitfalls of using eBuyer, we’d be really happy to hear from you.

Alex has never used eBuyer before, but often checks the offers’ site; HotUKDeals.

On 24th April, he spotted a great deal on a Samsung Syncmaster BX2231 that eBuyer were offering for just £83.33. At the time of ordering, he noted there were 23 remaining in stock. He paid, and received confirmation that my order had been allocated stock and was waiting arrival of his shiny and reasonably-priced computer monitor.

Until this morning!

He received an email telling him there was a stock warning on my order. It wasn’t clear what was going on, so he was forced to phone their expensive customer services number. While on hold (14 people in the queue…), he found the SAME monitor on their website for £160+! (Ed: It’s now been discontinued)

After eventually getting through, he was told that they would be happy to send out a monitor if he paid the full amount! When he asked why the price was different they tried to tell him it was a different monitor. When asking them how it was different because of the exact same spec, he was told “I don’t know, you’d have to ring Samsung”.

He was also told that; “We had a few at a lower price and they’ve sold out, we can’t send you out one of the monitors in stock because we’d be losing out…”

That is after already allocating him stock, and being unclear on emails whether he’d get it.

Not only has Alex lost out on a well-priced monitor, he’s had to deal with eBuyer. There is some legal basis on when this happens. I’m no lawyer, but as I understand it – so long as the advertisement from eBuyer wasn’t deliberately misleading; and they aren’t still running the advert, they’ve not done anything they can be prosecuted for.

However, promising him the stock; then saying they have ‘no stock’ – and claiming that the same model advertised at a higher price is a different model is very very suspect. Even if the authorities aren’t interested; we’ve heard that this game has been played before by eBuyer. If any of our visitors ever come across this with eBuyer or another company, it might be worth contacting the ASA on their Complaints Form. They now deal with internet advertising.

You can find a few hundred more people who’ve had very similar experiences on the thread on HotUKDeals.

It’s really sad to see other people having this problem. We really would love to hear from you all about your experiences.

We’ve had a report from Roger, who’s also had problems returning faulty products to eBuyer.

This time the product is a camera, and less than 6 months old. Just a reminder, warranty with retailers is always at least one year. So how are eBuyer getting away with this?

I would never use this company again. A few months back I bought a camera for my daughters’ birthday. She opened the box took a couple of snaps, and then put it away. A month or so later she took it out to use it again; on turning it on the LCD screen had failed. Since it’d had virtually no use, and been stored in its box I can only assume some underlying manufacturing defect.

eBuyer refused to take any responsibility despite the goods being less than 6 months old and refuse their responsibility under the Sale of Goods Act. They have pushed responsibility back on to me in contravention of the act. I don’t have time to mess about in the courts for such a small sum, especially as I work abroad a lot, this was my reason for using an internet site in the first place. Next time I will USE A REPUTABLE HIGH STREET NAME – it’s worth any difference in price.

Just to remind you, and eBuyer (I suspect Armando Sanchez himself reads this site, given some recent information);

“If goods are faulty and you wish to claim a full refund you should contact the trader within a reasonable period of time, this time period is not set out by the law as it will vary depending on what has been purchased and the circumstances of the sale.” – Sale of Goods Act

Naturally, eBuyer have locked my account after my latest problem, trying to return a HDD which failed after one month after purchase.

If you’re not aware of it, the HDD was found to be dead 6 weeks after I received it. Tried to return – apparently I have to pay to send it to Western Digital via Courier (cost; £35ish), since I’ve had it over a month. Despite the Sale of Goods Act says returns are the responsibility of the retailer for one year.

eBuyer have refused to co-operate after speaking with Trading Standards, so am pursuing legal action – all for the paltry sum of a maximum of £90.

It’s unusual to lock an account for having legal problems over their terms – but not in such a way that you can still login. After logging in, you can get to less of the site than when logged out.

The problem I have? eBuyer don’t always provide an invoice. It’s expected that you can print off invoices from their site after purchase – for a few months at least?

The only way of knowing is you have had a response is by email, and only then can you create a new eNote to reply to it.

It could take some time before I get hold of my previous invoices. In hindsight I should’ve printed them when I received the goods. But isn’t it expected that companies should ship an invoice, or at least let you have access to print them; even if they want you as a customer no longer?

As an aside, I had to do the same thing to O2 recently, since you cannot get full invoices from their site. I phone them up, argued that their invoices online were imcomplete and they happily obliged after some coercing.

eBuyer: Why don’t you clear things up, let me have access to my invoices and send me a new hard drive as a gesture of goodwill. It might do more for your image than you would expect.

More Returns and Pathetic Technical Support

The item didn’t have most of the features they advertised on the item description page, and some advertised features didn’t work properly. Although this was partly the fault of the manufacturer (Arkara), I sent eBuyer an eNote listing the problems I’d had with it and asking whether they would consider replacing it with a different NAS enclosure considering that I would not have purchased this one if I had known that the features they had advertised did not work.

They told me I’d have to phone their technical helpline, which I did. The technical support bloke was the most useless twat I’ve ever spoken to in my life. After putting me on hold he came back and started telling me the complete rubbish that I “needed to forward the correct ports on my router for any of the functionality on the work”. I tried explaining that I had this directly connected to my LAN switch with my computer.

Even though I had been completely reasonable and polite he then started to insult me for no good reason, saying that I “obviously didn’t know anything about the basics of networking if I didn’t know about forwarding ports”. I explained that I have a degree in electronic and computer engineering and am a professional software engineer so I do actually know what I’m talking about, but he refused to help any further. This experience has completely put me off buying anything from eBuyer ever again and I sincerely hope that this useless tin-pot criminal company goes out of business as soon as possible so they can’t keep ripping people off.

This is a fairly typical experience of eBuyer. Wanting to return an item as it is “Unfit For Sale”; and them directing the customer to the extortionate technical support line, at 10p/minute. Of course, then they insist its’ the customers’ fault, and suggest your being insulting if you dare question their abilities.

Apart from them being totally technically incorrect; you should rarely set up a NAT to use forwarded ports, unless you want your data accessible externally to everyone; clearly he wanted to be able to blame the customer as so not have to return the item to the manufacturer. To me, this seems clearly missold, as is it not fit for the purpose it was advertised for.

I truly hope that Sam and anyone else affected gets their money back.

You might find an alternative number for eBuyer on our “Shout at eBuyer” page.

Thanks again to Sam for telling her experience. Are you in this situation? Please let us know.

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